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Comment by russell | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, they are using correct English. The male gender is used for the gender neutral case. We need something that is truly gender neutral, but all attempts sound wrong to anyone who made it through high school English. S/he is unpronounceable. They sounds strange when talking about a single individual, but kind of works. You works somewhat, but in an employment ad sounds like something out of "Mission Impossible".

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please cite a source for "The male gender is used for the gender neutral case". as far as i can tell, this is an issue with no clean solution in modern English.

'he or she' is the most reasonable option in my opinion. it is cumbersome, but that is better than sexist or grammatically incorrect.

'we are looking for a technical lead. he or she will have three years experience as a lead developer or similar role.'

Singular third person "they" is widely attested and there is no grammatical problem with it at all. It's even in Shakespeare. You can use it, and if anyone complains about it, don't hire them.

Shakespeare is not good english. His work is old, and the language has evolved, and his work is poetry.

Also, citation needed for using 'they' as singular. Apart from the fact that it very strongly sounds plural, one of my personal pet peeves with English is the fact that we do not have a singular plural differentiation in the second person. As long as we are re-working pronouns, lets not repeat that mistake.

When I am trying to be careful and gender neutral (for something that needs to be speakable, so no (s)he), I try to structure it to use either 'one' or 'that person' in place of (s)he.

While I was also taught that using "he" as a gender neutral pronoun was good english, it looks like that has fallen out of favor.

Seems to be an artifact of older formally trained english teachers.

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30455/is-using-he...

Using "he" has fallen out of fashion.

Call me a purist though, but I still detest using "they". It doesn't seem right.

It isn't right. What it is is humiliating. And humiliation is the entire point.

I sincerely doubt anyone would ever have any ulterior motives like that. Is the whole world out to get you?

Gaslight much?

Various discussions here (by militant anti-prescriptivists):

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=27

and approval here:

http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/dept-min/pub/legis/n41.html

For the plural second person, try out my ancestral dialect's "y'all".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun#Universa...

In most cases for jobs 'they' could be appropriately used.

Also for the record I don't really care. I've seen good and bad women and men programmers. Getting huffy about pronouns just strikes me as someone that is a bit too emotional. Huh, strike a chord? (j/k)

linked wikipedia article clearly supports that there is no clean solution, imo.

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